This site is a collection of thoughts and ideas I have been working on for several years. They have mostly lived in handwritten notes and notebooks, over 40 of them at this point of time and growing. I have a preference for paper and pen for sure.
Recently it has seemed to me that this body of work has finally arrived at a kind of coherence, where even to me, what has been driving me over these years is starting to become clear. I thought the time has come to pull these thoughts out of their paper homes with the hope that another level of clarity and coherence might occur, particularly with what readers might have to say.
Throughout my professional career there has been a signature concern that has persisted and is reflected in my work and notes, and that is, how do we bring about better and more enduring outcomes from what we do.
My career has gone through several distinctly different phases, starting out of college as an engineer designing complex control systems, to later becoming a business manager and consultant. There have been detours as an entrepreneur, and specialist roles of systems and business architect and designer. In the beginning a lot of my work happened from within technology enterprises but the work I had an opportunity to do touched broader concerns of the enterprise, both within and without. That way I got to think deeply about issues of strategy, innovation, knowledge, social dimensions and challenges of change and transformation. Along the way I added formal degrees and practice in foresight.
Over time, my interest generalized and morphed into all human enterprise, not necessarily a business or an organization, its own health and the outcome of its work. As some of my writing will reflect – my conclusions led me to conceive of human enterprises as living, and hence the title.
As a practitioner, I had an opportunity to learn from my engagements and reflective practice extracted the learning from this process into frameworks and methods, that evolved but also got tested with every new opportunity.
What I have then on this site are the Themes that occupy me, the ones that pose complex challenges, the Living Enterprise idea, which in some sense is all about the Architecture of an Co-evolving entity, and the Strategic Impact Framework for how to bring about better outcomes, which I call Meta Design.
I expect my posts here to initially seem somewhat disorganized, but I believe after I have enough of my work up, a pattern will emerge. I am not finished of course, and I give myself the permission to change my mind. I also do not promise to only write or reflect about only these things that I have described.
If any of this interests or intrigues you, comment on my posts or reach out to me.